Jake Mahaffy, associate professor of art and film

“Recognizing and accepting limitations and learning to adapt without compromise is an ongoing process and one of the most painful and important in any lively engagement with reality. It is artistic living by definition: a generous, creative way of negotiating the crises and complications of personal experience. Over the years, as I’ve subjected myself to severe limitations in filmmaking by an insistence that the circumstances, no matter how poor, should contribute to the form of any given project, I’ve found that creativity is expressed not in the pure imposition of one’s artistic ‘vision’ on the world, but in the friction between one’s creative intentions and the immutable contradictions provided by the material world. The stress and frustrations of obstacles in the way of ‘art’ are opportunities to see a previously unknown aspect of reality and, hopefully, beauty.”